UPCOMING EVENTS

isoHunt, the group now best known for launching The Old Pirate Bay, has announced a $100,000 giveaway to boost its popular torrent site. The Pirate Bay, once the most popular file sharing website on the planet, still isn’t back online following police raids on its data center in Sweden, but the alternatives are hardly standing still.

In addition to payment, which will be made in bitcoin, the isoHunt team is promising “public recognition.” The $100,000 figure will be distributed over six months in the following way: $10,000 a month for development, $5,000 a month for moderation, and $5,000 a month for content uploading.

The last part is interesting because The Old Pirate Bay hasn’t allowed users to upload content directly to the site — its sources have been other public torrent indexes. The development contest will start on February 1, while the moderation and uploading contests will begin on March 1.

The timing of the launch is curious given that The Pirate Bay is expected to return in less than a week. Although The Old Pirate Bay has proved popular, it’s difficult to say how big of a following it will have once the original site has been reborn.

Last month, The Open Bay, which lets anyone with “minimal knowledge of how the Internet and websites work” deploy their own version of The Pirate Bay online, became an open source engine for the Old Pirate Bay website. The Open Bay has already birthed hundreds of such “copies”.

“In order to boost up that process we are announcing unprecedented move!,” the isoHunt team told VentureBeat in an email. “The idea behind this message is to empower community to create OldPirateBay.org as they see it. And we’re ready to reward the most active participants along the way.”

How exactly “most active participants” will be determined is not clear yet, though we’re told contest details are coming soon. We’ve asked the isoHunt team for more information and will update you when we hear back.

Update: For the development contest, the isoHunt team will create a list of the top features and distribute the budget as it sees fit. It will then take the first five pull requests for the each feature and determine a winner based on code quality. As for the moderating and uploading contests, the team plans to create a scoring system that will take into account different actions from participants.